Adapting the plan

 I’m still working through my re-write of my novel set on an orbital shipyard.  In theory, this should just be a case of writing the story around the bare bones of the chapter plan I’ve already worked out.  But it never ends up like that.

Despite having produced several chapter plans for several novels, I still sometimes fail to recognise where the real cliffhangers are at the ends of chapters.  I’ll come to look at my outline, and as I write that chapter I’ll realise that the notes outline a very weak ending to that part of the narrative.  Or, more often, I’ve carried that viewpoint on beyond the real cliffhanger.  When I come to write the chapter I usually realise what I’ve done, and stop earlier than the place indicated in my outline.

I met one of these situations this week.  A tense scene in one character’s head has her waiting helplessly to see if a sentient AI survives the removal of some code from his systems.  This was literally a life or death situation.  If the removal was not done properly, the AI would die.

I built up the tension nicely in that chapter, with all my character’s fretting and fear.  Then I deflated the tension right at the end of the chapter by, almost casually, showing that the AI survived.

This is where I departed from my chapter plan.  I ended that chapter before the character knows whether the AI has survived.  Then I switched viewpoint to another character.  That character had faced a similar situation in his past, and it had traumatised him.  So switching into his head gave me the opportunity to ratchet up the tension again.  

I also did that by having that character leave the AI’s ship.  He runs away from his good friend because he can’t cope with the situation.  That allows me to follow him and his avoidance strategy of going to a park and hugging a tree.  It means that news of whether the AI survived can be delayed in reaching him.

In this rewrite I kept the tension going for two chapters instead of one, and it allowed me to fill in some of the ex-military character’s background.  I didn’t want to do too much of that though, because the incident which caused his trauma will be written in a later book in the series.

I often find myself doing that kind of rearrangement as I write,  It often results in me having to annotate my chapter plan with boxes around text and arrows moving that information to a later chapter.  On a multi-viewpoint novel this adjustment can sometimes be tricky, but it’s worth it to keep the tension up in the narrative.